Flying by Foy created custom rigs fro the performance of Garden of Earthly Delights both in its orginal turn on the stage in the'80s and the recent revival

Some frank talk and basic rules about flying safely

 We’re in the entertainment business, and accidents that happen during a show’s production do not a favorite topic make. The recent tragic deaths of performers from falls while performing aerial work, or flying, provoked a variety of reactions among stagehands. Robert Dean of ZFX is blunt: “Honestly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. I bet there are a lot of near misses— the hand sprain, a hand breaking—things like that that don’t make the news.”

“It’s not a rare situation,” agrees Bill Sapsis of Sapsis Rigging. “But it is hard to tell how often it happens.”

 

Another moment of flying in Garden of Earthly Delights

License to Fly
 
 The first problem is that there’s no bar, no license per se, to fly, so there’s a lack of awareness of what it entails. While the ETCP Rigging certification program is extensive and thorough in its commitment to codifying and licensing practitioners of the industrial art of rigging, it was designed to not cover the details and peculiarities involved in flying a person.
 
 “It specifically leaves out flying in performance,” says Eddie Raymond, vice president of IATSE Local 16 in San Francisco and co-SME (Subject Matter Expert) chair of rigging for ETCP, along with Sapsis. “We have found in all of our work a great deal of difficulty in codifying a standard that we could then turn around and teach to people, who we didn’t know, that would cover all the safety aspects of flying performers.”
 
 Raymond, Sapsis and everyone else we spoke to were vocal in their support of the ETCP rigging certification program, but stressed that it wasn’t anything close to enough to know how to safely fly a performer.
 
 “You can draw a very close correlation to a driver’s license with that certification,” says Joe McGeough, director of operations at Flying by Foy. “Because there are people that drive on the road that frustrate all of us every day, aren’t there?”
 
 “I know people who passed that test who are people I don’t consider to be good riggers,” adds Dean. “All major flying companies, on the other hand, have much more intense and hands-on training experiences.”
 
 Raymond advises people interested in pursuing this as a career to get trained at one of the large flying companies, as they have the resources to do not only do the training, but the testing that is necessary to prove that the systems being designed are going to work as they’re intended.
 
 “You need to learn from those people,” says Raymond. “It’s kind of like in the circus. If you go to circus school, you’re learning from people who are already experts in that field. If you want to be a trapeze artist, you don’t go to Yale.”
 
 McGyver at the Helm?
 
 Still, not everybody follows this advice and gets trained, and this can be a big problem for organizations looking to put on a show with flying. As Tracy Nunnally, associate professor and technical director at the Northern Illinois University wrote on a Stagecraft e-mail exchange: “How many McGyvers are out there trying to provide big effects for the least amount of money? If a kabuki drop or dry ice machine is done on the cheap and doesn’t work right, it looks bad, but no one gets hurt; when flying is done on the cheap, one small oversight can cost a life.”
 
 Theatres interested in flying a performer need to protect themselves and their performers by talking to as many riggings companies that provide a flying service as possible. Tell them what you want to do, ask them how they would do it if it would be safe. Ask them where they were trained, who they have worked for and how many productions they have been on. Then call the next one on your list, and go through the process again. This “peer review” of your concept will give you an idea of how safe your idea will be to implement, and also give you a good idea of how prepared and skilled your possible riggers are. But you’ll still need to do more research into your options, and that’s where you need to prove you’re serious about safety.
 
 

Sapsis rigging doesn’t fly performers during a show, but they do rig people for photo shoots and other events. Here, the Sapsis crew prepares Mikkail Baryshnikov for a photo shoot.

“Vetting someone for an aerialist act is difficult because there are few organizations,” Sapsis says. There is the American Youth Circus Organization (AYC), which “is a good place to start.” In some larger cities there are trapeze and circus schools, and that might be a good place to inquire. So what not to do? For one, don’t just take someone at their word …
 
 “You’ve got to get references,” Sapsis says emphatically. “First thing to do with anyone saying they can fly people in a production is ask for references and be diligent on checking them out. One local reference does not a reference make—at least three to five of them need to be called.” “I wouldn’t hire someone who has done less than 10 flying effects in productions,” adds Dean.
 
 “It’s Not Just Amateurs”
 
 The road to flying performers is rife with challenges that could turn dangerous, but there are ways that even people who aren’t riggers can make it safe. Sapsis says one big problem he sees over and over again is the director not leaving enough time for rehearsing the flying aspect. He or she means to get to it, and then it’s suddenly two days before the performance and it’s done in two half-hour sessions, which isn’t really near enough time. “Flying looks easy, but it’s very difficult, and allowing plenty of time so everyone is comfortable with it is essential.”
 
 Don’t short change the rehearsal process in any respect, and that means actors practicing in full costume. Finally, never have anyone fly without using the oldfashioned “buddy” system. “Someone else other than the performer always needs to check the equipment before they go off. This needs to be a technician or another trained performer to make sure everything is connected and hooked. A second pair of eyes is critical.” Flying by Foy gets everyone involved in their safety watch.
 
 “It’s not just one person’s responsibility for safety, it’s everybody’s,” says McGeough. “We’re always asking for people to bring to our attention different noises that happen during the show or something that they see that’s a little bit off. It doesn’t necessarily have to be anything with the flying, it could be something that interacts with the flying— whether another perfomer, an animal or a piece of scenery.”
 
 Dean says that with all the thousands of theatre groups across the nation, it’s very likely that someone is flying in a production under less than perfect conditions “every day. And it’s not just the smaller and non-profit theatres, but professional ones as well.” In his vast experience, he’s seen corners being cut in a junior high school cafeteria production all the way up to Broadway. “It’s not just amateurs.” A common scenario he sees happening is when people involved with the production are trained and comfortable in doing the stunt, but then someone tries to make one “small” change, a change not carefully thought through, and one that puts performers and technicians out of their comfort zone.
 

ZFX flew performers for the grand opening gala at the Guthrie Theatre

 “You should not be rigging something unless you’re 100% sure of what you’re doing,” Dean explains. “If you’re only 99% sure, you shouldn’t do it, because that’s where the misadventures come in. It all starts with the words ‘all we have to do is’. It could be change this rope, move this pulley, change a movement …” and that’s where the trouble, and danger, come in. Under close scrutiny, a production doesn’t even really save money when it puts safety someone further down in the queue than first. Dean says out that a professional flying company can cost as little as $2,000, while a questionable rigger is charging, say $1,000. “It’s not that much of a difference, especially if you factor in the possibility of a lawsuit if an accident occurs. Then there’s the bad press that follows that. So anybody who thinks they are saving money, aren’t.” Bottom line: “You want to hire a professional."

Options
 
 Bruce Purdy, Technical Director of the Smith Opera House, has been doing technical theater all his life and has yet to fly a person himself — which is just fine with him.
 
 “I’ve always made it clear that if we want to do it, we need to hire a company that specializes in it,” Purdy says. When the theatre considers a flying special effect and the money isn’t there, they decide not to do it rather than cut corners. It hasn’t affected the quality of their productions in the least. Recently they did a popular production of Peter Pan with no flying. “The flying was done through dance, and was blocked and lit in such way that they very well could have been flying. It worked very well.” For a show based on Aladdin, they had two dancers dressed in black that lifted performers on a pallet with a carpet draped over it. You could see the actors being carried, but you didn’t pay attention to it and that worked really well.
 
 “There are solutions,” Purdy says. Sapsis’ final comment is simply to never bite off more than it can chew. “It’s so easy to look at flying effects as a great event and go crazy with it, but even a simple flying effect is difficult to do. Remember it should never be about the flying effect, it’s about the show.”
 

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